About this site
atomiswave.info is an unofficial history of Sammy's Atomiswave arcade board and its AW-NET online service. It isn't affiliated with Sega Sammy, SNK or any of the game publishers.
Where the material comes from
- Saved web pages from the Wayback Machine, mostly awnet.jp and Sammy's own sites. Each page lists the address and date it was saved.
- Magazine scans of Arcadia from complete issues on the Internet Archive, and two strategy guides.
- Trade press and fan sites of the time: Impress Game Watch, AM Press, Amusement Journal, Dengeki Online and Japanese players' diaries and forums.
- Company documents: Sammy's and Sega Sammy's annual reports, earnings reports and press releases.
- Hardware notes from the MAME project's Atomiswave driver, the board and cabinet manuals, and collectors' photographs.
- Card scans of surviving cards, made for this site.
How material was chosen
A saved page is included only when its contents match what the Wayback Machine recorded for that address and date. Images have to trace back to a known page or publication. Magazine pages have to actually mention AW-NET or an Atomiswave game. Fan and press reports are credited to whoever wrote them.
Some things were left out: other companies' arcade networks, features only in the home versions of these games, phone files whose origin can't be shown, and pages that turned out to be login prompts or error messages.
Dates
Web pages are dated by when the Wayback Machine saved them. That can be weeks or months after the page first went up, so a page "from" January 2005 may describe something from 2004. Magazine pages use the issue's cover month. Where a page's own text gives a firmer date, the summary uses it.
Translations
The summaries and articles on this site were written in English from the Japanese sources. The full text of each saved web page has also been machine-translated, so you can read the whole page; those translations are rough and are labelled. The original Japanese is always alongside. Japanese names of arcades, titles and quotes are left as they were printed.
What's still missing
Some parts of AW-NET may never turn up, but these are the biggest gaps:
- Anything behind the login. No one has found screenshots or saved copies of a member's own Web Garage, My Data or shop pages from the live service.
- The phone side. The sign-up and billing screens, and the actual wallpapers and ringtones members downloaded.
- Full shop lists. Prices and items survive from guidebooks and magazines, but no complete list for any game.
- The technical side. How cabinets talked to the servers, what the server software was, and how data is laid out on an AW card.
- Kintaro's exact release date.
If you have AW cards, operator manuals, magazine issues, phone screenshots or photos from 2003–2006, they could fill some of these gaps.
The 2004 website
awnet.jp is a separate project: a reconstruction of the AW-NET website as it looked in mid-2004, built from the saved pages listed here. This site is where the evidence lives; awnet.jp shows what it looked like.
Trademarks
Atomiswave, AW-NET, the game titles and their artwork belong to their owners, including Sega Sammy, SNK, Arc System Works and the other publishers. Original files are kept unchanged and are shown for historical reference.